SDXD

I've been President of SDXD since January 2015 and was a board member for just over a year prior to that. I thoroughly enjoy planning and putting on creative events with fellow creative, enthusiastic, and passionate UX professionals. This has also allowed me to get comfortable speaking in front of a crowd, which I once feared but am starting to enjoy.

I was a member of the group for several years before I became a board member. I have always loved their focus of making sure you leave the events having learned something you can use at work the next day. I love knowing we are still hitting that mark every month.

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Creative Lunches

When SDXD isn't enough, I find time to plan workshops for creative lunch hours. I floated the idea to a few people, built a team of co-workers who were willing to put in free time after work, and created what we now call "Innova MindGames." The intent was to build soft skills and cross-team collaboration while learning a framework you could use on your project.

We planned a few of the events ourselves, but promoted it as a safe environment for colleagues to bring an idea and facilitate their own workshop. That created an interesting challenge on our end. When co-workers bring their own workshop ideas, we collaborate with them to make sure we still hit the original goals of the creative lunches. Each workshop must incorporate an underlying framework that can later be applied to project work or a lesson to be learned that is relevant to working with teams.

We get a different mix of co-workers for every creative lunch. Testers, developers, business development, accounting, executives, project leads... co-workers from all roles and departments would participate. New employees have always loved how quickly this helps them get to know people in the company.